HDD Makers Want Long-Term Contracts With PC Vendors

[freggo]

"Grey market" has nothing to do with low quality if the drives are factory new. The drives are still from the same manufacturers and no manufacturer in his right mind would let 'rejects' get out into the marker; grey or otherwise.
"Grey market" is the usual scare tactic to keep prices high; same as the anti online purchase campaigns because local brick and mortar stores can provide better 'service'. We all know what kind of service we get from the local computer-mart chain of course

 

[teodoreh]

[citation][nom]cheepstuff[/nom]How is that immoral? They reimbursed you. It would be immoral if they refused to hold up to their warranty, and if they were actually doing whatever they want, why would they uphold their warranty. How does this need an investigation by the EU? They haven't stolen anything from you, in fact, they stand to lose the most because you do not have to do business with them in the future.[/citation]

Oh really? The customer bought 2TB hard disk and now they give him some money back, and this money is not enough for a 500GB HD!! I am pretty sure that if the customer went legal, he would kick both my, my retailer's and Segate's ass. And you know something else? Seagate *can't* tell that they have no stock so they bring back money. They *do* sell 2TB hard disks - just in ridicilous prices.

EU should investigate:

* How is it possible the floods on a place that produces 25% of all hard drives, to create such a mess in the market with prices going up from 50 to 150%!

* Possible lobbying from Seagate and WD regarding the timing of the warranty reduction. Btw minimum warranty in EU is 2 years and Seagate still in some countries will give 1y! Wow!

* Possible lobbying and blackmailing of OEMs regarding contracts.

I hope this will happen. It will be a valuable lesson to all those frauds out there..

 

[thrasher32]

"HDD Makers Want Long-Term Contracts With PC Vendors"

...and people in hell want ice water....

 

[bigshootr8]

Perfect scenario for pc company's to give them the bird. BRING ON SSD powa! maybe see a 500 gig ssd around 300 or so

 

[eddieroolz]

This just adds more fuel to the fire that's called my hypothesis - that HDD makers are purposely prolonging the inflated prices.

 

[xerroz]

Hahaha. I'm SO convinced now that this is a conspiracy by the HDD makers to drive up the prices to make easy profits. We're talking BILLIONS of profits here. There's no problem in the factory, this is all BS fed by them to have a reason to increase prices. The fact that they come up now and not only want consumers to pay up more, they now want PC vendors to sign contracts that forces them to pay incredibly inflated prices? This whole mess is fixed. There should be an investigation of this whole mess and punish the bastards WD, Seagate, etc are.

 

[tomfreak]

Well HDD makers can continue to jack the price for all their "greedy Needs", why? because they aint gonna get high volume sales, most consumer are not stupid. Sales of HDD will be much lower than usual. Me for example will not as long as it stays at this price. I got enough anyway.

I bought 3x Samsung 1TB HDD b4 this flood. I was thinking to get the 4th one. But the greedy HDD maker want to prolong all this inflated price. GO ahead. With more than 3TB of storage(including all mine old HDDs) I am good to go another 2-3years without buying a new one.

So my 4th new HDD will be 2-3 years from now? or it depends on how fast they restore their pricing back to formal price.

 

[xyster]

good thing I only buy SSDs these days.

 

[John1969]

heh, just before flood i bought couple drives as my mass storage. now the only thong that can come out of this is more competition in SSD sector... bring it on.

 

[DRosencraft]

Yeah, I'm not gonna jump on the tinfoil hat party bus just yet. There really have been very catastrophic floods in that part of the world where, yes, something like forty percent of all HHDs are manufactured. Compare this o the price of gas here in the states when a storm comes through the Gulf of Mexico during hurricane season. Just the fear of a stoppage of a week or so of oil production and output that measures in the single deigit percentages, jacks price of oil on the stock market, and spikes up gas sometimes as much as $0.50 in places nowhere near the storm - and I'm not talking about regular price gouging. Is there a real need to raise prices so much? When you're talking about an industry that is operating at production capacity in attempts to meet demand, any supply shortage is gonna have a huge impact.

That said, this is a stupid and ridiculous money-grab by the HDD manufacturers. The airline industry does the same contract thing will gasolne - they attempt to lock in lower oil prices by signing multi-year contracts at a preset price. That's how some low-cost airlines manage to operate so much cheaper than their more expensive counterparts for a while and then seem to just disappear. But that's oil, a commodity that rarely drops much in price at a fast enough rate to make a difference and is prone to spiking. I can't imagine a vendor doing this when they can be more certain that prices will come back down. The vendors have the advantage at the moment. They have alternate options. They can pressure HDD manufacturers to bring prices down faster in a few months when production should be back up to full pre-flood levels. The manufacturers don't have as many advantages in pigeonholing vendors into accepting such an obviously bad deal.

 

[Homeboy2]

[citation][nom]frozonic[/nom]hahahahaha trust me, one day you will see a 2TB ssd for less than 100$SSD FTW!!![/citation]

yep, but HDD will be 100 bucks for 20 TB then.

 

[Onio4yas]

[citation][nom]drwho1[/nom]I bet that in about 2 years this madness will be gone.4TB will be common and they will be around $100 +/-.That's when I will buy new hard drives.[/citation]

The same as my purchase decision.

Not wise to buy hdd at current high price. Media has released great profit on hard drive after the flood in Singapore where hdd retailers are storing the hdd and sell at higher price.

 

[userngalan]

they only want to recover their company from the flood